Public Health in East and Southeast Asia presents an overview of the state of public health across this vast region and considers the challenges and prospects for its future advancement. It pays particular attention to how rapid economic progress has brought accelerated change, both demographic and epidemiological, to an area already marked by great heterogeneity in health status and public health systems. In comparative and thematically oriented chapters, leading scholars consider such issues as changes in values and lifestyles, infectious diseases, nutrition, tobacco, chronic diseases, accidents and injury, environmental health, occupational health, the effect of globalization, and health services.

Health patterns in Southeast Asia have changed profoundly over the past century. In that period, epidemic and chronic diseases, environmental transformations, and international health institutions have created new connections within the region and the increased interdependence of Southeast Asia with China and India. In this volume leading scholars provide a new approach to the history of health in Southeast Asia. Framed by a series of synoptic pieces on the "Landscapes of Health" in Southeast Asia in 1914, 1950, and 2014 the essays interweave local, national, and regional perspectives. They range from studies of long-term processes such as changing epidemics, mortality and aging, and environmental history to detailed accounts of particular episodes: the global cholera epidemic and the hajj, the influenza epidemic of 1918, WWII, and natural disasters. The writers also examine state policy on healthcare and the influence of organizations, from NGOs such as the China Medical Board and the Rockefeller Foundation to grassroots organizations in Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines.

This book is the first to present a regional analysis of climate change and human health, focusing on geographically and socio-economically distinct countries of South and Southeast Asia. It has a major focus on India, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Malaysia, Thailand, Nepal and Taiwan. Climate change is a significant and emerging threat to human health. lt represents a range of environmental hazards and will affect populations in both the developed and developing countries. In particular, it affects the regions where the current burden of climate-sensitive diseases are high, which is the case in South and Southeast Asian countries.

Do states have a duty to prevent infectious disease outbreaks from spreading beyond their borders? The fields of global health and international relations are increasingly concerned with the responsibilities of nations to respond to disease outbreaks in a way that safeguards their neighbors as well as the broader international community. In Containing Contagion, Sara E. Davies focuses on one of the world's most pivotal (and riskiest) regions in the field of global health—Southeast Asia, which in recent years has responded to a wave of emerging and endemic infectious disease outbreaks ranging from Nipah, SARS, and avian flu to dengue and Japanese encephalitis. Between 2005 and 2010, Davies explains, Southeast Asian states, despite having vastly different health system capacities and political systems, repeatedly committed to pursue a collective approach to the communication of outbreaks. Davies draws on newly gathered data and extensive field interviews to explore how these states implemented the revised International Health Regulations (IHR) through the deliberate alignment of political interests and regional cooperation. Examining why these Southeast Asian states adopted a collective approach, Davies also describes the complications that ensued and traces the consequences of this approach. The first book to explore what problems exist in the relationship between international relations and health, Containing Contagion frames contrasting views of global health agency within the current crises that are facing global health. Providing an immediate, contemporary example of a region networking its response to disease outbreak events, this insightful book will appeal to global health governance scholars, students, and practitioners.

The Asia-Pacific region has not only the greatest concentration of population but is, arguably, the future economic centre of the world. Epidemiological transition in the region is occurring much faster than it did in the West and many countries face the emerging problem of chronic diseases at the same time as they continue to grapple with communicable diseases. This book explores how disease patterns and health problems in Asia and the Pacific, and collective responses to them, have been shaped over time by cultural, economic, social, demographic, environmental and political factors. With fourteen chapters, each devoted to a country in the region, the authors take a comparative and historical approach to the evolution of public health and preventive medicine, and offer a broader understanding of the links in a globalizing world between health on the one hand and culture, economy, polity and society on the other. Public Health in Asia and the Pacific presents the importance of the non-medical context in the history of human disease, as well as the significance of disease in the larger histories of the region. It will appeal to scholars and policy makers in the fields of public health, the history of medicine, and those with a wider interest in the Asia-Pacific region.

Global public health is of growing concern to most governments and populations, nowhere more so than in Asia, the world’s largest and most populous continent. Whilst major advances have been made in controlling infectious diseases through public health measures as well as clinical medical treatments, the world now faces other challenges including ageing populations and the epidemic crisis of obesity and non-communicable diseases. New emerging infections continue to develop and the growing threats to health due to environmental pollution and climate change increase the need for resilience and sustainability. These threats to health are global in nature, and this Handbook will explore perspectives on current public health issues in South, Southeast and East Asia, informing global as well as regional debate. Whilst many books cite Western examples of the development of global public health, this Handbook brings together both Western and Eastern scholarship, creating a new global public health perspective suitable to face modern challenges in promoting the population’s health. This Handbook is essential reading not only for students, professionals and scholars of global public health and related fields but is also written to be accessible to those with a general interest in the health of Asia.

The contributors to this volume show how the practices of health in Southeast Asia over the past two centuries were mediated by local medical traditions, colonial interests, range of health agents and intermediaries.